voidpointer

I loved this story when I read it in "Surely you are Joking..." It is exactly how it still works at large Tech-Corps. Number of Patents filed is a metric the PHBs love to use in order to determine the innovativeness of departments and there is a nice bonus for submitting your ideas to the patent-process. Middle management is running around asking people whether they could think of anything they could submit because that will make the department look good - and there you go... loads of BS-patents and I bet you that Dollar that this is exactly how he Microsoft page-turn-gesture-thing became a patent.

This is not how it works. In the patent application you have to describe how your invention works.

In software patents, the implementation is described in such general terms that a lot of the time, any implementation can be said to use the method described in the patent. This is my biggest problem with software patents: once you abstract your solution enough, it isn't of much use to anybody, hence the value of the patent to the general public is null while it still allows you to block out competitors that want to find a solution to the same/similar problem although your patent is of no help to them actually solving the problem.

It is this skewed relationship that drives me crazy. Licensing a software patent only allows you to come up with your own solution a lot of the time, it does not save you the development cost.

If you license a patent for some industrial process it saves you huge amounts of research cost so licensing the patent is actually attractive.

Software should only be patentable if the patent provides actual value in solving the problem it claims to solve. Since useable software implementation are so specific, this may rule out patenting software at all.

Great example of the problem with software patents. Landmark has a method for music-matching. They would love to be the only one having access to that technology. The confusion starts where the patent system is meant to only protect how their particular implementation matches music and not the concept of music matching at all. They on the other hand argue, that the method described by the author is similar to what they have patented - after all, it uses the same fundamental CS concepts such as hash-table lookups etc...

As other mentioned, the idea with patents was to offer people a limited time monopoly on their innovations in exchange for publishing them so others could use/enhance these ideas instead of reinventing the wheel over and over. I have not seen one instance where this works out for software...

What Jobs says is totally consistent from his perspective (or if you will, from within his reality distortion field): In a world, where there is only apple devices, Flash indeed has outlived its usefulness because there is no need for multi platform rich application/content development/authoring when there is only one platform left. Surely, that is how Jobs would like to perceive the state of affairs. Given how well Apple is currently doing in leading the mobile device space, his vision does seem to to converge with reality. Unless of course, the competition will get their act together and do something with Android that will have as much mainstream-appeal as the iPhone.

If the author of the app provided a link to a full source code download in the app itself and on the appstore page, wouldn't that make the whole thing compliant, at least in spirit, with the GPL? Everybody would be able to download the source, build/modify it themselves and run it in the emulator and if they have a developer certificate install it on their phone.

But would your situation have been any better if you had just declined to speak to them? The amount of time wasted on your part could have been far greater (let alone expenses for an attorny)

It feels like it is more likely that this is made up than Jobs actually replying to some random dudes email.

It looks like some commenters here and on the linked site actually believe this is a genuine email exchange with the real Steve Jobs... Why?

I was just wondering about the same thing. It's the super-long (over) exposure. See http://www.solargraphy.com/index.php?option=com_content&...

Ok, to answer my own question... It is the long exposure time. See http://www.solargraphy.com/index.php?option=com_content&...

I'm surprised that he is able to scan the latent image from the exposed photographic paper without developing it. Especially since the scanner will further expose the paper so it would be useless afterwards... Maybe this is just working because the paper gets way overexposed and that will make the latent image actually show without development. Does anybody know what's going on there?

I see this the same way. The TOS states that you are not allowed to use an intermediary layer to call the iPhone OS API. A C++ or C library that would abstract the underlying OS' API would clearly be such an intermediary layer and if there would be sort of a QtMobile or wxPhone or whatever framework that would allow you to write cross platform mobile applications in C++, Apple could ban it based on their new rules - even if you were sticking to the approved set of programming languages.

If you consider the output "object code" there would be no need to edit, let alone roundtrip. You don't edit the object-code or byte-code from your compiler either.

Adobe used to be behind SVG a lot before the acquisition of (referred to as the merger with) Macromedia.

As far as the statement from unity is concerned, it sounded like it wasn't really backed by any real indication from Apple about their solution not being banned. However, there is also no actual evidence (yet) that it is actually banned and that Apple will enforce the ban. Consequently, as they are about to ship a new release, they want to sound as confident as possible. I am very doubtful though whether they have any real idea regarding if and how they will be affected. I think they're mostly trying to prevent panic.

Neither would I. When analyzing risk, there is also always the risk that you didn't recognize something as a risk at all. Maybe this is the Black Swan event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) of mobile application development... Unlikely but disastrous at the same time...

Isn't it funny how many people using alternative runtimes seem to say "I can fully understand why they would ban Adobe/Flash but why on earth would they also ban my favorite runtime"?

Apple didn't make this move because they have some irrational religious hatred against Adobe. They are just betting that a tight control over the technology by which people produce applications for their mobile platform will be advantageous to them. They are fully aware that this is bad for people who have bet on using different technology and I guess is that they just don't care the tiniest bit.

This is a good example of what is still utterly wrong today with HTML/CSS implementations. I appreciate the work and the fact that it is shared with the public. The fact that you still have to deal with this sort of markup in 2010 is really sad.

This feels wrong on so many levels...

Basically, they reserve the right to ban any sort of DSL/runtime/engine application architecture. Imagine you are building adventure games (like Money Island). You'd have a game engine and a domain language in which you describe the game. The beauty of this is, you don't have to rewrite the engine every time you finish a story for a game, you just write in your DSL. The same holds for a range of other applications such as travel guides, recipes for cooking... How can you be sure where they draw the line between data and code?

Well, it probably just depends on whether it comes from an Adobe tool or not. Let's see who's next.

Here is the press release from the ASMP: http://asmp.org/articles/press-release-10-04-07.html

Interestingly, it says "The new class action goes beyond Google’s Library Project, and includes Google’s other systematic and pervasive infringements of the rights of photographers, illustrators and other visual artists."

I wonder what else they may be filing suit over... Image search?

I think, when trying to help someone, asking for more context is a good thing. The examples that are given in the article are often things that arguably sound a bit more complicated than necessary (writing a windows app in assembly). Thus, the question is a valid way to establish a bit of context and by no means an implicit denial of the validity of what is being asked. "Because I want to know how it works" or "because I have reason to believe it is the only way it will work/be fast enough" are good replies and the whole thing leads on to a nice discussion (No not an exchange of tweets, a real discussion!)

This leaves quite a lot of questions...

Were the homework assignments of a type were using a computer to prepare them would actually help? Did the computers include the appropriate software that was needed to do the homework? Had the homework to be submitted in paper form and did the computers come with printers?

This is going to be really nice when cleaning up old photos with dust and scratches

99 bucks to get your company name and a piece of clip-art? I think people who go for this just don't deserve any better.

One should probably just automate this. Pay $20 to istockphoto for a piece of vector art and put the company name beside it. That's an easy made $79. So if easterbunny inc. needs logo, just license http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-11054108-rabbi... and you're done. The quality would be comparable to those logo templates.

Many people obviously have started to believe that a logo is a bit of illustration plus your name.

"I then built a middleware layer that would either decorate the content with a layout template..."

Methinks you might have a somewhat non-standard definition of the term middleware. Please have your buzzword generator re-calibrated ;)

... by users that have managed to master entirely text-based editors like emacs or vi to a degree that allows them to still be as productive as their brethren who moved on to slicker IDEs :)

It's great they put it up that way as that seems to be the native resolution the demo was recorded at. That way, you get the optimum display quality of the text. Since most of the screen stays the same much of the time, it isn't that much of a bandwidth waster after all even at the higher resolution.

If clang could come up with better C++ template error messages that would be really sweet. STL related error messages in g++ (and MSVC) are really hard to figure out, especially when C++ is not your main language; so you're not exposed to those problems on a daily basis.

This is what as the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. A lot of progress works this way. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis]

Thesis (established view): SQL/ACID solves all you data problems

Antithesis: Nobody needs SQL/ACID, let's throw it all out

Synthesis: By carefully considering data integrity constraints we can find a more optimal data management solution for a particular problem (alternatively: let's go to the pub!)

It's CWEB (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cweb.html) A language based on C devised by Knuth as a language for "Literate Programming" (http://www.literateprogramming.com/)